Airbnb is back with an olive branch! But only after their failed attempt to get the Tennessee Legislature to prevent Nashville, and only Nashville, from regulating short-term rentals (STR).

Last week, at a meeting of a special Metro Council committee tasked with recommending short-term rental policy, Airbnb’s representative claimed Metro’s current STR ordinance is a nationwide model.

That is not true, but it may be their nationwide model — since they wrote and advanced Nashville’s ordinance more than two years ago. That ordinance was sold on the idea that it should be legal for people to rent a room in their home occasionally.

However, Airbnb’s ordinance also allowed absentee owners to buy entire houses and rent those nightly. There is a big difference between renting my empty bedroom and investors buying up houses all over Nashville to rent nightly for parties of a dozen people (concentrated in East Nashville, Midtown and 12South).

Airbnb still tells the story about its humble start as a couch-surfing app. But today, only about a third of Nashville’s approximately 3,000 legally permitted STRs are owner-occupied homes. Over half operate as unsupervised mini-hotels. And while the legal limit for STR houses is 12 people, Airbnb currently advertises some claiming to accommodate 30.

Advertising STRs for too many people is one way Airbnb and other platforms help STR operators flout the law. More remarkably, these booking sites currently list another 3,000 Nashville STRs that lack any legal permit, thus, effectively conspiring with thousands of people to break the law and, ahem, evade taxes.

Jeffrey J. Miller(Photo: Submitted)

Airbnb’s representatives admitted as much at last week’s Council STR committee meeting.

So, what kind of olive branch are they holding out?

Beyond the issues of permits and unpaid taxes, a key element missing from the debate is quality of life. Nashville residents are tired of drunken parties, “wooing” bachelorettes, late hours, trash, traffic, blow-up sex dolls, crude and lewd behavior, fights and other negative impacts unsupervised STRs bring to neighborhoods.

They’ve asked Metro Council to address these issues.

Other cities — including New Orleans, Denver, Austin, Chicago and San Francisco, where Airbnb is based — have outlawed absentee-owner STRs in residential neighborhoods.

So too have Brentwood, Belle Meade, Forest Hills and Hendersonville, without a yelp of protest from Airbnb’s small army of lobbyists. If it is good enough there it should be good enough for Nashville as well.

Airbnb claims to weed out bad actors, yet the bachelorette parties keeping coming. Neighbors continue to see and hear drunken STR patrons vomiting in the front yard, skinny dipping, leaving sex dolls in windows, and partying into the wee hours of the morning.

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Memphis residents recently discovered an absentee-owner STR operating a brothel next door. East Nashville residents were shocked to learn an STR guest set up shop as a massive drug dealer.

Several Council members have taken positive action by sponsoring an ordinance (BL2017-608) to phase out only absentee-owner STRs in residential neighborhoods.

This ordinance will not ban STRs, as Airbnb would have you believe.

People will still be permitted to rent rooms in their own homes.

So too will non-owner occupied STRs be permitted in apartment and condo complexes and in mixed use and urban districts (such as along the Gallatin and Charlotte Pike corridors).

While this change will not resolve all STR-induced problems, it will help reduce many quality of life issues absentee-owner STRs have brought into neighborhoods.

Call your Council member and ask him or her to protect your neighborhood by supporting this legislation as written.

Our homes, our neighborhoods should be the one refuge we can trust as safe from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. We should not “compromise” away our neighborhoods as an extension of lower Broad.

Jeffrey J. Miller of Inglewood is an attorney and member of the Nashville Neighborhood Alliance.